Software Engineer, Foundation Industries

Most software lives entirely inside a screen. At Foundation Industries, the software ends at a CNC machine cutting metal. My work here is full-stack platform engineering for manufacturing operations: the systems that connect a customer's CAD file to a quote, an engineering review, a production plan, a machine on the floor, and a finished part out the door.

The problem space

Manufacturing quoting isn't a checkout form. A single order has to reconcile incomplete customer inputs, part geometry, materials, tolerances, quantities, delivery expectations, machine constraints, and internal engineering judgment. The workflow has to stay consistent across all of them. The interesting engineering is in turning that ambiguity into a dependable workflow that a customer, an engineer, and a machinist can all trust.

What I've worked on

CAD & engineering review

I contributed to an interactive 3D file-review experience: direct geometry interaction, feature selection, and design-for-manufacturability (DFM) annotations at the part level. The real story isn't "I built a 3D viewer." It is that this changed how engineering intent and manufacturability feedback move through the order pipeline, replacing older GLB-based annotation flows with direct feature selection.

Machine monitoring

Collecting data is easy; making it operationally useful is the hard part. I helped implement machine-data infrastructure at a safe level of abstraction:

1. 01CNC machine (Haas) emits MTConnect-style data.
2. 02A Raspberry Pi collector/proxy polls and forwards it.
3. 03Structured ingestion normalizes the stream.
4. 04PostgreSQL / Supabase stores it.
5. 05Dashboards, KPI reporting, and scheduling signals consume it.

Those dashboards surface spindle time, runtime, utilization, program state, and available-production-slot calculations: the numbers that actually drive scheduling and capacity decisions, not just a wall of telemetry.

Quoting, scheduling & operations

Across the platform I've worked on quote creation and editing, delivery tiers and pricing consistency, purchase orders and paid-order locking, production-slot and machine-capacity visibility, order milestones and ownership, and the operational glue around them (administrative order management, audit history, and communications workflows). The through-line: software that sits close to a physical process and has to respect its constraints.

Reliability & platform integrity

My work here isn't only feature UI. It's also included route protection and permissions, secret-protected scheduled jobs, Stripe webhook idempotency, audit ledgers, and Playwright / Vitest end-to-end testing with CI quality checks and test-database hygiene. Building software that touches real orders and real money means treating reliability as a feature.

What this role is teaching me

How to build software around physical operations: manufacturing constraints, machine data, payments, and the humans (machinists, engineers, customers) on either end of a workflow. It's the clearest example I have of going deep enough to understand a real, messy domain and broad enough to ship across the whole stack.

Status

Current role: Software Engineer, Redwood City, CA (full-time for Summer 2026), at Foundation Industries (Sava Robotics, Inc., DBA Foundation Industries).